Places in the Dark

by Thomas H. Cook

  “The times you talked to her, did she ever mention anybody else? A friend or acquaintance?”

  Claire shook her head. “Not that I recall. She wasn’t much of a talker.” She smiled. “Like you.” She plucked the cigarette from her lips, drained the last of the coffee. “I wish she’d just kept on going.” She crushed the cigarette in the bottom of the cup. “Of course, I wish that for everybody that ever come to this town. God knows Port Alma’s fit for nothing.”

  She gazed into the cup a few seconds, rolling it between her rough factory-worker’s hands. Then she looked up, stared at me quite blatantly. “You got a nice face,” she said.

  I glimpsed my ravaged features in the window glass, how well they mirrored my wolfish core.

  “Nice eyes too.”

  The better to see you with, I thought.

  Chapter Four

  On the drive back into town, I thought of my brother, of how different we’d always been, two answers to the same riddle, as my father had once said, I the heir to all my father’s ways, Billy the golden scion of our mother.

  And so it hadn’t in the least surprised me when it was decided that I would be sent to Columbia Law, while Billy would inherit the Sentinel.

  “Your mother believes that William is best suited to run the paper,” my father told me the night I was informed of their decision. “As you know, he’s always enjoyed being around the office. The printing machines. And your mother tells me that recently he’s taken to composing little essays.”

  We were in my father’s study, a room hung with faded engravings of classic scenes, Cincinnatus behind the plow and Cicero in the Senate. It was the room in which we’d read the ancients together while Billy tumbled playfully in the snow beyond the window or went flying past with a baseball bat or a fishing pole. My father sat in a high-back leather chair, his gray hair shimmering in the firelight, my mother a few feet away, tucked into a floral window seat, a book in her lap.

  “As for your own future, Cal,” he added, “I’ve often thought that you might be quite well suited for the law.”

  “The law?” I asked.

  “Everything is cut-and-dried in a legal practice,” he explained. “There’s no need for …” He searched for the word. “Sentiment.”

  “Unless there’s something else, Cal,” my mother said abruptly, her eyes upon me searchingly. “Some other direction you’d prefer. Or something you have a particular feeling for.” She waited for me to point out such a direction, then suggested it herself when I remained silent. “Your drawing, for example.”

  She meant the sketches I’d made over the years, mostly local scenes, stone walls, wooden fences.

  “There are schools where you could study drawing,” she added.

  I’d never considered such a thing, but its disadvantage was obvious. “I couldn’t make a living drawing.”

  “Exactly,” my father said. He seemed impatient that such a course had even been broached. “I was thinking of Columbia Law. It’s a fine school. What would you think of studying there?”

  “Fine,” I said. “I need a profession. The law is a good profession.”

  “Yes, it is,” my father agreed. “It requires a fine mind. And you certainly have a fine mind, Cal.” He glanced toward my mother. “And Billy has the right requirement for running a newspaper,” he added.

  “What requirement is that?” I asked.

  My mother’s answer came softly. “A heart,” she said.

  The kind of heart Billy had already demonstrated,fierce and impulsive, disinclined to calculate the odds before diving into turbulent water, swimming out to a drowning child.

  “So we’re all in agreement, then?” my father asked, getting to his feet now, visibly relieved that so much had been decided without argument.

  “Yes,” I said. “All in agreement.”

  I left for Columbia Law the following year, leaving Billy behind in Port Alma, writing to him often but seeing him rarely, save for the all-too-brief summers when I returned to Maine.

  Over the next few years, while I continued my studies in New York, his interest in the Sentinel steadily deepened. He went there almost every day after school, staying as long as my father would let him, writing imaginary columns, covering imaginary stories. It didn’t surprise me that after graduating from high school he chose not to go to college, but went to work at the paper instead.

  Several years later, my father retired, and Billy took over. By then he’d become “William” to everyone but me, no longer a boy, but a man poised to take his place as a pillar of the community.

  We celebrated his ascension with a dinner in Royston. It was the last time we ate together as a family. My mother moved into a cottage on Fox Creek a month later, leaving my father alone in the big house outside of town. She’d planned the move for a long time, Billy told me later. She’d waited only for her sons to grow up, to establish lives of their own.

  We’d done just that by the time she left our father. Billy was fully in charge of the Sentinel by then. He’d moved into a small house not far from the newspaper’s office, filled it with his usual array of books, magazines, and the bric-a-brac he’d gathered over the years. I got a job in the district attorney’s office, routinely prosecuting whatever cases Hap Ferguson tossed onto my desk, and finally took a somewhat larger house only a few blocks down the same street as my brother.

  And so our lives went forward. When the water mill burned down, we walked its charred remains together, Billy in order to describe the destruction, I to make sure it had happened by accident rather than design. Still later, when the county’s one remaining covered bridge collapsed, we surveyed the ruins side by side. I made sure no harm had been intended, while Billy searched for some small symbol of the vanished humanity the old bridge had served, the wagons and buggies that had rattled through its dark tunnel, as he later wrote, “carrying wood chips, coffins, brides.”

  Over the years, I read scores of his articles and news stories, never in the least imagining that his fate might be coiled invisibly within the folds of a few plain lines: Single woman seeks employment. Any offer will be considered. Inquiries should be forwarded to the Port Alma Hotel. Attention: Dora March.

  She’d been in Port Alma over a month before I saw her. Then, on one of those December days when chill winds whip cruelly around corners and snap at cloth awnings, I spotted her coming out of Madison’s General Store. She was wearing the long cloth coat I would see so often in the coming months, and carried a bag of groceries and supplies. She didn’t so much as glance in the window of Ollie’s Barber Shop as she swept by.

  “That’s Ed Dillard’s new girl,” Ollie said when he saw that she’d caught my eye. “Took over from Ruth Potter. Does whatever needs doing around the house.” His eyes followed Dora as she strode beneath the fluttering awning of Bolton’s Drug Store, head bent against the wind. “She’s a pretty thing, that’s for sure. Can’t blame Ed for hiring her.”

  Ed Dillard was a retired businessman who’d once been the town’s mayor. He’d been a widower for as long as anyone could remember, and there’d never been any children, a fact that had generated a certain level of speculation as to whom his considerable fortune would go to when he died. He’d suffered a heart attack some six years before, and since then a series of local women, mostly widows from surrounding farms, had come and gone from the great house he’d built on Ocean Street three decades earlier. Some of the women had been fired, but most had quit, the common complaint being Ed’s irascible and demanding nature, along with the sheer amount of work necessary to see after such a large house, clean its many rooms, dust the scores of porcelain figurines Ed had collected over the years.

  “You could never satisfy him, or even get all the work done,” Ruth Potter told me when I came by her house, the Canadian storm bearing down upon us with its weight of snow, so that I’d had to stomp my shoes outside the door. “That’s why I was so glad to see Dora show up that day. I didn’t know a thing about her, of course
. Didn’t much care either. She was willing to take the job. That was enough for me.”

  We were in the front parlor of Ruth’s house when she spoke of these things, a room crowded with overstuffed chairs and a lace-covered table cluttered with framed pictures of her son, Toby, a lanky, somewhat lazy boy who’d been blown to bits in the Great War. I remembered him as dull and slow-witted, with little to recommend him but a toothy grin. Glancing at the little mausoleum Ruth had created to his memory, it struck me how ordinary and inconsequential a person might be and yet inspire a deep and deathless love, the joy of Barabas’s mother that Christ would die instead.

  “Mr. Chase?”

  I tried to focus once again on the reason I’d come. “Yes, go on.”

  “Well, I’d seen that little notice she put in the paper,” Ruth continued. She was wearing a brown dress with large lemoncolored flowers and a tattered wool sweater, frayed at the cuffs. A musty smell came from her, sweet and pungent, like overripe fruit. Outside, I could hear her husband chopping firewood, grunting slightly with each blow.

  “So you contacted Dora?” I asked.

  “Left a note at the hotel, saying that I’d seen her notice in the paper and might have employment for her.” She glanced toward the window. “Say it’s gonna be a bad one. The storm. Hope we don’t get snowed in too long.”

  “Did you mention what the employment was?”

  “No, I didn’t say anything about it. I was afraid that if she knew it had to do with Old Man Dillard, she might not give it a chance. He had a reputation, you know. For being hard to deal with.”

  “What did you tell her in your note?”

  “I just wrote my name and the address. I figured if she was interested, she’d come by.”

  Which she’d done later that same afternoon.

  “I was working upstairs when I seen her come up the walk,” Ruth told me. “Mr. Dillard was in a fury over something. I kept trying to calm him down. Good heavens, I remember thinking, if he keeps carrying on like this, nobody’ll ever take this job.” She drew a weary breath. “Then I looked out and this young woman was coming up the walkway. Selling something, I figured Bibles. Something like that. It didn’t strike me that she was the one who’d put the notice in the paper.”

  “Why not?”

  Ruth thought for a moment before she answered. “Because she didn’t look like the type who’d be looking for that kind of work. Young, I mean. And pretty. Didn’t look the type who’d be interested in seeing after a crotchety old man.”

  “What else do you remember about her?”

  “Mostly that she was real ill at ease. Like she’d never been invited into a house, didn’t know how to act in one.” She glanced toward the window again, to where Mr. Potter could be seen slumped on a heap of wood, breathing heavily, snow swirling around him like a horde of white-winged moths. “He’s going to kill himself, chopping that stuff.” She continued to watch her husband for a moment, then returned her attention to me. “Tense, like I said. Figured she was that way because she really needed a job, and that was making her jumpy.”

  There’d been a kind of desperation in Dora’s eyes, Ruth said, like someone who’d reached the end of her rope, exhausted the last of her resources.

  “But even if she really needed work, I made it plain that this was no picnic. I was real honest. Told her all there was to it. All she’d have on her shoulders. Sweeping. Cleaning. Doing dishes. Laundry.”

  Dora hadn’t flinched at the amount of work.

  “That’s when I got to the hard part,” Ruth said. “Tending to Mr. Dillard. The way he was. That he could get real snippy when things didn’t go his way. Stubborn, too, always wanting to do things for himself, even when he couldn’t do them. Told her all that, but she didn’t seem to mind that she might get treated a little rough.”

  Suddenly, I felt that I was in the dark again, spying on the yellow light that seeped from Dora’s window, the red robe dropping from her shoulders, revealing all the evidence I would ever need of how “rough” she had been treated.

  “Maybe she was used to it,” I said.

  “Being treated bad, you mean?” Ruth asked. “Could be.” She shrugged. “But I told her that the worst thing was the reading. How Mr. Dillard liked being read to. Hour after hour. Enough to drive you crazy. She said that wouldn’t bother her. So I said, ‘Well, okay, then. The job is yours.’ She came to the house the very next day.”

  An impulse overtook me. “Any way I could see it?” I asked. “Her room.”

  Ruth was clearly surprised by the question. “What for? Dora ain’t been in that room since Ed Dillard died.”

  “I’d just like to take a look at it.”

  “We could get stuck in all this snow.”

  “We won’t,” I assured her.

  “Well, okay, then.” She pulled herself to her feet, wincing slightly. “I still got a key to the place. But we’ll have to take your car. Ours ain’t running.”

  A few minutes later we arrived at Ed Dillard’s rambling house, walked up the snow-covered walkway and into the front room. Everything was silent, motionless, the furniture covered with sheets.

  “Can’t find a living relative, that’s what the lawyers say,” Ruth told me as she peered into the ghostly parlor. “That’s why everything just sets here. ‘Cause they can’t find nobody to give it to.”

  The white sheets sent a shiver through me. Billy had lain under one with the same stillness, a lifeless arm dangling toward the floor until I’d finally placed it on his chest, then drawn the sheet back over him again.

  “I guess Dora covered everything up,” Ruth said. Then she led me up the stairs to the room Dora had occupied during the few weeks she’d worked for Mr. Dillard.

  It was plain but tidy, its single window overlooking the broad front lawn of the house, a chair drawn up beside it. Lace curtains hung over the window, and there was a beige paper shade with a string pull that jumped slightly, like the pendulum of an edgy, disordered clock, each time I took a step.

  While Ruth watched, I looked in the closet where Dora had hung her dresses, then went through the drawers of the bureau beside the bed that had been hers. I even searched behind it for some clue to where she might have gone. Finally, I sat down in the chair by the window.

  “She didn’t seem to care what the room looked like,” Ruth said. “I don’t think it mattered to her. The accommodations, I mean. Probably glad to get a room of her own. She’d been living at the hotel, you know.”

  She’d come early the very next morning, Ruth told me.

  I imagined it as a typical autumn day in Port Alma, brilliantly clear and windy, with gusts sweeping waves of crimson leaves across the lawn.

  “She come on foot,” Ruth said. “Nobody brought her. She was toting a suitcase. All she had, I guess.”

  I parted the curtains and peered at the grounds below.

  “I was getting this room ready when she came back to take the job,” Ruth added. “Mr. Dillard was sleeping in his wheelchair. He always took a nap in the afternoon.”

  The snow now obscured the lawn, but as I continued to peer out the window, the seasons reversed themselves. Fall returned, blustery and windswept.

  “I just looked out that window, and there she was.”

  I imagined a woman striding resolutely toward the house.

  “That’s when Mr. Dillard woke up all of a sudden.”

  Wearing a long cloth coat, her emerald eyes fixed straight ahead.

  “And started squirming around, all upset and panicky.”

  Dora sailing toward me.

  “Like he did when the pain hit him.”

  On a river of red leaves.

  Chapter Five

  I looked in on my mother the next morning, something my brother had done each day on his way to his desk at the Sentinel. His loyalty to her had been heartfelt, an ardent affection she had in every way returned. I was a poor substitute for Billy, of course, merely the surviving son, as she no doubt regarded m
e, tied to obligations she assumed I did not feel.

  She no longer lived in her beloved cottage by Fox Creek. The stroke had made that impossible. And so Billy and I had moved her into a house not far from Main Street. We’d done most of the work, getting the house ready for her ourselves, enlarging rooms and putting in windows so that she would get the light that brightened both the space around her and her spirits. We’d hung bird feeders outside each window as well, hoping to occupy her eyes, the one part of her body, other than her mind, that the stroke had not damaged.

  Her daily needs were taken care of by Emma Fields, an old woman who’d recently lost her husband, and with him, her rented home and livelihood. Emma was a short, round woman with white hair and watery blue eyes.

  “Snow’s gone, looks like,” she said when she opened the door.

  “Not for long,” I told her. “Another storm’s coming in.”

  Emma looked at me, alarmed. “Soon? I need to get to Madison’s.”

  “You have a couple of hours,” I assured her. “But you can go now if you want. I’ll look after Mother.”

  “Guess I better do that,” Emma said. She snatched her coat and scarf. “I’ll try and be quick about it.”

  My mother lay in her bed, propped up against the headboard, her eyes bright, fully aware, her speech remarkably clear despite the fact that the left side of her face was drawn down sharply. It was a miracle, Doc Bradshaw had told Billy and me, that she could talk at all.

  If so, it was the only miracle. For in every other way, she was dreadfully weakened. Her hands trembled uncontrollably, making it impossible for her to hold a cup or a book, and she could not walk at all.

  But for all her physical suffering, I knew that her inner anguish was now deeper still, knew too well that she lived within a cloud of grief, continually remembering Billy at every stage of life, the gleaming boy, the sterling man. For that grief, there was no relief. Long ago, she had abandoned the consolations of her Catholic faith with the same commanding resolve and self-confidence with which she’d replaced it with ideas of social improvement, deism, and the high romance she had bequeathed to her now-dead son.